Culture and Action: Predestination, Theodicies, and Counterterrorism

• In Event: 365 - Regular Session. Sociology of Culture

Abstract

This article explores the potential of cultural sociology for contributing to critical studies of terrorism: a field with its own eponymous journal as of 2008. Richard Jackson (2015) a leading voice in the field, critiques the absurd, paranoid, and dangerous logic of the War on Terror as emerging from what he calls an “epistemological crisis” and he calls for its deconstruction. For Jackson, critical studies of terror ought to reveal the absurdity of counterterrorism principles by de-coupling our lack of knowledge from the imperative to act. Cultural sociology offers a deeper understanding of this crisis. Weber’s conceptions of predestination and typologies of theodicy (Simko 2012) along with the sociology of culture, cognition, and morals (Blair-Loy 2013, Vaisey 2009 Vaisey and Lizardo 2010, Fry 2012) reveal the cultural logic underpinning the epistemological crisis to explain why it makes perfect (cultural) sense that ignorance and action should be coupled tightly together. The War on Terror is best understood as moral action in a moral key.

Author

• Marshall Battani, Grand Valley State University